This post ended up quite long, so added a quick summary to get to the point at the start:)

The point of this post is to as understand what tools you use to build your websites? I have a few weeks left for the dreamweaver trial, at which point I will decide to buy or not. If in the meantime I find a better tool, then I will certainly try that too.

I have decided to rebuild my existing site, www.parisbyphoto.com as it is really not designed well and grew randomly as and when I went out and took photos that I found interesting. I was going to just reorganise and rebuild using the same tool, rapidweaver, which is easy to use but unfortunately, with that ease of use comes lack of real flexibility. So, I looked around for another tool and came up with dreamweaver.

To start get to grips with dreamweaver I built a new site, quite small but a good exercise, www.gigapixelparis.com. Basically, for this site I built a single template, marked some areas as editable so I can add a bit of descriptive text for each gigapixel image and made it possible to change the gigpaixel image being loaded etc. Each time I want to add a new gigapixel image, I should have to spend no more than 10 minutes adding it, which compared to working on Parisbyphoto will be a treat.

I will certainly enrich the site as it matures, but first I will add another 16 gigapixel images, some are nearly ready, some need to be taken when I get better weather.

Another thing I am working on is the gigapixel tutorial, which is nearly ready. It will be a pretty basic tutorial though; as I am pretty much just starting out with these gigapixel photos.

The rebuild of parisbyhoto.com is going to take months, especially considering I only have my spare time to work on it due to a full time job doing something to pay the bills! So if I am going to invest so much time, I want to use the right tool this time. With that in mind, I was wondering what tools other people use....this bit I added to the top as post too long...

I like most the split view in dreamweaver, which allows me to edit the site graphically or direct in the code, which is very useful. So any other tools that I would consider would need offer some similar functionality.

First step is to actually have a fairly concrete design before you open Dream Weaver.

Make a mockup of what you want the site to look like using pen and paper, photoshop, or inDesign. It is a lot easier to experiment with design ideas using these tools than it is working in Dreamweaver.

For the record: Everything I build is designed in either Photoshop or Indesign. I code the websites using vim (a fancy text editor). Technologies used usually include: